Electric Guitar Setup String Height

Tune the guitar to desired pitch.

Electric guitar setup string height.

Tune the guitar to pitch. String height or action describes the distance between the top of your frets to the bottom of your strings. Check the pickup height. Turn the guitar on its side close one eye and look down the neck from the headstock towards the bridge left.

Check the height between the fret located at the neck and body joint and the bottom of each string refer to the. Adjust the truss rod to add relief to the neck if that s what the player prefers. Measure string height on the first fret for each string using your feeler gauges. This distance plays a key role in your setup because it determines the ease in which your guitar can be played.

These are not the only acceptable string heights but they are a starting point as the happy medium all comes down to your own personal preference. Action determines how much pressure and distance is required for the string to make full contact with each fret. A famoussetups here are over three dozen precise setup specs collected by dan erlewine as he interviewed famous players and roadies. For electric guitars in our opinion a good default string height at the 12th fret is typically about 6 64th of an inch 2 38mm on the bass side and 4 64th of an inch 1 59mm on the treble side.

Look down the profile of the fretboard on both the bass and treble sides of the neck is the neck straight or is there a curve. Then measuring with the string action gauge adjust the string height to the player s preference. The most commonly used string heights are 3 64 and 4 64. Pickup height is measured from the pole piece to the bottom of the string on the bass and treble sides with the.

How to set up a guitar perfectly step 1. Sight the neck please read the beginning of this article for. This may involve adjusting the height of the saddles or of the string slots in the nut. For acoustic guitars we ll want to go just a bit higher than this.

The higher the strings the more tension they have and the harder it will be to fret the notes.